In the space of his own lifetime, George Washington saw himself canonized, transformed from a gung-ho fox-hunting Virginia squire into a transcendent symbol of the new American nation. He came to be regarded, Joseph J. Ellis writes in his absorbing new book, as ''the American Zeus, Moses and Cincinnatus all rolled into one."

Combining real and imaginary settings, artists have been depicting and embellishing Washington's legend, personal history and public contributions for more than two centuries. When examples from many eras are gathered in an exhibition format, it is fascinating to see how each period has made Washington into a role model appropriate to the priorities of the moment.

George Washington sensed -- as he had as leader of the Army during the Revolution -- that he represented more than an office. He symbolized the entire republican experiment, and in the early years of his Presidency, he wanted as many citizens as possible to see the figure who embodied their common hopes for the new nation.

The President's character, his contemporary critic wrote, was a "non-describable, chameleon-colored thing called prudence," which was "in many cases a substitute for principle" and "so nearly allied to hypocrisy that it easily slides into it." The critic was Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary pamphleteer. The President was George Washington, at the end of his second term in 1796.

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A historian says recently discovered construction elements in the basement of a 19th-century beer garden on the Bowery convinced him that it was the site of the Bull’s Head, a famed Colonial-era tavern.